Tag Archives: Idris Elba

Cats (2019) Movie Review

I am not overly familiar with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s feline musical Cats, but I gather that the 2019 film adaptation from Tom Hooper is fairly loyal to the subject matter. Victoria (Francesca Hayward), a young white-haired cat, is thrown violently from a car and finds herself in London streets populated with other cats. She just so happens to be arriving on the day of the Jellicle Ball, an annual event where jellicle cats compete in the Jellicle Choice, which allows one lucky jellicle cat to ascend to a new jellicle life in the “Heaviside Layer.”

I cannot confidently tell you what “jellicle” means.

Cats is, to put it kindly, hard to watch. The humanoid manifestations of these cat characters, rendered in CGI but maintaining the general visages of the performers’ faces, has been Continue reading Cats (2019) Movie Review

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) Movie Review

Look. I could begin this review by telling you that Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) is a former low level criminal who left a life of crime to become a former government agent who left a life of government work to aid in a heist, thereby putting him back on a life of crime, until those criminals decide to mainly just save the world, thus putting Hobbs back into government work.

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I could tell you that Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) is a lifelong criminal who killed a friend of the aforementioned criminal heisters and proceeded to Continue reading Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) Movie Review

Molly’s Game (2017) Movie Review

Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game is based on a true story; a true story told by a potentially unreliable narrator. Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), a one-time Olympic contender, is under indictment for running an illegal gambling ring. Technically, she’s guilty (she wrote a book on the subject when she was in need of some money). All the same, the story is much more complicated than guilt versus non-guilt.

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The story is complicated, but the movie makes it much more complicated than it needs to be. Sorkin jams into this 140-minute movie three storylines involving Continue reading Molly’s Game (2017) Movie Review

The Dark Tower (2017) Movie Review

Over the course of his prolific pop-literary career, Stephen King has published eight novels under the heading of The Dark Tower series. The series is a dense genre-bending tale of The Gunslinger, brimming with a desolate Western vibe and fantasy tropes.

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The Dark Tower, the long-awaited film adaptation being helmed here by Nikolaj Arcel, is 95 minutes long. It merely skims over that Western vibe to focus on the six shooters and the giant lasers.

You might already see Continue reading The Dark Tower (2017) Movie Review

Star Trek Beyond (2016) Movie Review

Three years into a five-year mission, the crew of the Star Trek Enterprise make a routine stop at the Yorktown Star Fleet space station. There, Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is tasked with locating a missing vessel, a mission that ends in an ambush. The villainous Krall (Idris Elba) crashes the Enterprise, stealing away most of the crew and stranding the rest on a nearby planet.

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Star Trek Beyond is a lot of bells and whistles, flashing lights and sweeping camera moves. While this at times yields action-packed returns and visuals that call for oohs and ahs, the spectacle as a whole is Continue reading Star Trek Beyond (2016) Movie Review

The Jungle Book (2016) Movie Review

In The Jungle Book, the live action adaptation of the famous Disney retelling, a boy (Neel Sethi) raised by wolves is put in danger by his own humanity, as the bloodthirsty Bengal tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba) vows to kill the child.

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CG burdens many films, which become over-dependent on them for spectacle’s sake. In the case of this film, the Continue reading The Jungle Book (2016) Movie Review